Lost in Darklife

My friend Anna Zwiers recently introduced me to the game of DarkLife, within Second Life.  It’s safe to be said that I’m addicted, and I have been rather lost there for the last week.  Rather stressd IRL, and it’s escapism without a proper balance right now.  Still, it’s a very good laugh.

In pictures we have me and Shion about to enter the graveyard, and then below Slayen (Evil Bunny), a dark mage taking on an Ether Warlock.

I haz yr bucket!

Taken in the sea outside of the new location for the Gnubie Store. If you don’t get the joke, then you need to check out

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/01/14/i-has-a-bucket/

icanhascheezburger.com/?s=bucket

slurl.com/secondlife/Powder%20Mill/153/116/14

Brief thoughts on the increased supply of land in SL

Linden Labs have announced that they are going to increase the supply of land by opening another continent and they are going to reduce the price of buying private islands. Their announcement got over 130 comments before they closed comments on the blog post, and they closed it in less than a day. The Massively news service reported on this also here.

There is a lot of moaning from big land owners/landlords who will inevitably see the price of their investments fall. However, it may help to encourage a lot more people to buy modest plots to put a single house on. The big worry though is tier fees. I know some people that have bought their modest plots and indeed a few that went in together and are now selling up. It’s hard to afford the land, and particularly the land tiers, and I’m even asking myself, do I need all of my land? Over the hill from me in the neighbouring sims of Pavonia and Nolidae etc, I recently saw big swathes of land up for sale at about half the price that I paid for my land. Then again, my land in Sabre seems to hold value a bit more, because of it’s nice protected location.

I would be a bit miffed to make a big loss on my land if I sold some or all of it, but then if more people get to own land in SL, then I’m up for a broader, happier community. I do wonder if Linden Labs are just trying to bring in more tier fees to increase their own sustainability, and are prepared to do so to the detriment of land barons’ own profitability. But then again, a more sustainable Linden Labs company makes for a more sustainable SL in the broad sweep of things.

If a few selfish real life economists manage to talk us into the threatened RL recession, and end up making a profit out of market turmoil, then this is bound to have an effect on the SL land market. Simply, if you don’t have the money to pay your bills so much, SL land becomes a luxury that you can’t afford. What would Linden Labs do if they created all of this new land and then there was say a 20% increase in land that was vacant at any one time? Would they close sims, and concentrate people on remodelled ones, saying we’ll move you there for no extra charge? Surely, running all of those extra servers that actually run that new continent costs Linden Labs extra money, and their sustainability would be hit big time by running this with a hight vacancy rate.

One final reflection, and I can’t find reference to this anywhere in those blog postings, is the issue of maybe making land that bit better for land owners of all sizes. At what point will the advance in the power of computers make it possible for Linden Labs to process more activity on land. Primarily I mean, upping the prim count that you can have on land. When I bought my first house, I got a nice big villa and it ended up with rooms that needed to be filled with furniture, and furniture eats prims big time. I now have a house that is by no means low prim, but it doesn’t need all of that furniture to make it look nice. Should Linden Labs keep focussing on expanding more of the same thing, or on a mixture of more land with land being more productive/useful for everyone?

I’m pondering on just where the balance lies in all of this. Balancing the interests of our gracious hosts, Linden Labs, without whom we wouldn’t have SL; the interests of big land owners, and the interests of those that might make the plunge for a modest plot if only land were cheaper to buy. Also, consolidating the experience of your average modest land owner by making land that bit more pleasurable and useful. I do hope that they get the balance right, in the long term.

The cave underneath Tesla – those crazy girls!

Giggle, I like the Tesla store, and Tesla Miles was the first person, if I remember rightly, that really got the sculpty hat and shoes thing going. Her business took off and she moved to her own sim, with her partner Lyanis Sin, and this seems to have given them a bit of freedom to play just for the fun of it.

There are more places to explore in their sim, that I’m not including in this post. There’s an underground railway station with wacky adverts and graffiti all over the place, courtesy of wotsisname – the guy who did the hobo sims. Then there’s the bizarre tunnel thingy that has you fly loop-dee-loop until you find things like a spot to sit and chat, with a horses head lying there for some reason! And a dance club at the top of a tower block, and and. Lots to explore.

The picture above is of the cave underneath the sim. The cave roof has been ruptured, maybe by the giant sculpty robots that stalk the streets outside, or maybe by the JETPLANE that is crashed in the lake, in said cave. Oh, and then there’s the pirate galleon, er….with a tree spirit hiding in one of it’s cabins. A tree spirit from the Japanese anime film Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime). The plane has a picnic rug and basket, for you to sit and chat, and the galleon has a burnt mattress with 62 sex poses. Crazy shit, and I like it!!

In the pictures above you see me standing on the shore, by some poison barrels, tainting the romanticism of the gorgeous prim light pouring in through the ceiling, onto the windlight rendered water. I love the cave texture also. The other picture has me and my friend Anna Zwiers, on board the galleon.

Here’s the SLURL to teleport to Tesla. You’ll have to find your own way down to the cave, and that’s part of the fun of SL – exploring:

slurl.com/secondlife/Tesla/32/82/54

New facelight for Windlight being given away in Tesla

Tesla Miles is giving away a cool facelight, that has been updated for Windlight. It’s by the lucky chairs, along with the really nice free Elise2 Mary Jane sculpty heels. Here’s the link to teleport to her store, and while there do check out the fab sculpty shoes and hats.

slurl.com/secondlife/Tesla/32/82/54

If you want to look at others, you may want to check out the freebie facelight for Windlight in BareRose Tokyo.

Oh shit, just don’t mess up my hair

Last night I visited Deadshot with my friend Anna Zwiers and her RL brother. It’s a zombie combat area, which I found on this blog post by Garth Goode (SLURL included there)

slwtf.com/2008/03/30/killer-zombies-from-japan/

This photo belies the fact that I kicked ass in the combat zone, as these zombies are just here for posing outside the store. Goddam, I’m so tough, when I chop onions, I make the onions cry

Ha, ha. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Oh, I can just hear Johnny Rotten’s voice saying that line now, and the tone of his voice seems apt.  So, following on from my previous two posts on the Geyl Fapp fiasco, (first post, second post) I got a payment of 799 Lindens from one of the organisers of the Endgame memorial.  I donated 500L to the running of the place and 500L to the box for Multiple Sclerosis Research, but who cares about the change?  Basically, the memorial site is now empty, as shown above, and it seems clear that the people who organised it feel as cheated as everyone else.

From the forum posts that I read, Geyl Fapp did behave like a very nice person in SL, but some people don’t feel happy. Blah, whatever, but going to the extent of making out that the real person behind the avatar is dead?  That is just not right, and it has taken advantage of the goodwill of many in SL.

I would get more pissed off about this, but I was just scrolling back to find the name of the person who returned my money, and saw that Hyasynth Tiramisu of Silent Sparrow fame had said hi to me, when I went to see a new sim that she’s involved in.  I was lagged and didn’t notice that, but then IM’d her to apologise.  She was very nice, and I also remember her greeting everyone when she held a party for having, I think it was 1000 members, in her group for her store.  That’s the spirit that really helps to make SL special for me, and which makes the Geyl Fapp thing just seem so pathetic.  There’s a store owner who clearly likes to design the clothes that she sells, and is very pleased at the way people love her creations.  She said hi to me, because she recognised my name, and that’s it in a nutshell: people matter.

Rumours that the death of Geyl Fapp is a fraud??

Pffff, I was browsing the photos of Zoe Zeffirelli before, in the absence of the mighty grid, and she has posted a photo to say that Geyl Fapp’s death was a big fraud.  I’m still touched by the Second Life: Endgame video, and what it says is the things that do matter. However, I’m now deeply confused by all of this fuss.   This forum (translated from Dutch if the link still translates from Google Translate) has a link to a Dutch web news site, that is supposed to show that it was a fake, that Geyl Fapp was actually a guy who pretended to be Geyl and messed with other people on SL, then covered his tracks with a grandiose death. That news story has been deleted, so heaven knows what is going on.  The only information left is really the stuff being said by the moderators of the forum for SL residents that Geyl had a hand in setting up (I think).

I don’t know what to think, but I was chatting to my friend Anna this morning, and was saying how do we know the money we give to Relay For Life is going to the cancer charity?  It really makes me doubt things, and sometimes even in a virtual world, one needs a foundation of trust.  Trust in friends and in institutions like businesses and charities.

Sale at Shu’s Guitar Shop

After a long bit of downtime for the grid, I caught up with my friend Anna Zwiers this morning, but then things crashed again.  Oh well, at least we got to check out Shu’s Guitar Shop and the sale there.  Fun guitars with a HUD to choose different animations and sounds.

Giggle, I like Anna’s choice of emote for this photo.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Helens%20Pool/180/141/21

A dying SL member sums up SL

I’m a born browser, and I was just mooching around through Flikr feeds before, and noticed that Katiya Rhode, SL poet and YouTuber, had a Flickr feed. I browsed her pictures, and some of her groups, then came across reference to an SL user Geyl Fapp having died recently, and linking to a film of hers. Geyl looks like someone who really engaged with SL, and also became a mentor. She died of multiple sclerosis. Here’s her wonderful video. It’s 26 minutes long, but I think that it’s worth watching, and for me it really sums up the things that matter in SL and RL.

http://blip.tv/file/783980?filename=Vsideways-SecondLifeEndgame724.wmv

Link to Zoe Zeffirelli’s picture of a memorial for Geyl Fapp.

There is a memorial web page here

And lastly, here’s an SLURL, to teleport to the memorial garden for Geyl Fapp. There is also a donation jar to help maintain the memorial and one to donate to MS Research.

Friends make our world

Analise